DesJarlais won reelection earlier this month, despite the campaign-season revelation that, over a decade ago, he pressured a mistress to have an abortion. In October, he had explained that story by saying he didn’t believe his mistress was really pregnant at the time, and had urged her to get an abortion to call her bluff.

But a 679-page court transcript from his divorce trial in 2001, released in the days after Election Day, made public much more about DesJarlais’ past — including the fact that his first wife had two abortions. In an interview with The Knoxville News Sentinel this week, DesJarlais said he never intentionally misled voters about his past, and has no plans to resign.

‘I am human,’ he told the paper. ‘I don’t think I ever put myself out there to be somebody that was perfect. I put myself out there as somebody who wanted to serve the public.’

According to the News Sentinel, the court document states that DesJarlais’ first wife had her first abortion when she was on an experimental drug that raised potential risks with the pregnancy. The second abortion occurred when the pair were having problems in their relationship. DesJarlais told the paper his views on abortion have evolved, and that charges of hypocrisy were unfair.

Jindal tries to reinvent the GOP as Big tent, but he’s talking to small minds in a pup tent.

Lousiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) rebuffed Mitt Romney’s claim that President Obama won reelection because of “gifts” to minorities and young voters, calling the statement “wrong.”

“That is absolutely wrong,” Jindal said at Wednesday’s session of the annual Republican Governors Association meeting in Las Vegas, according to the Washington Examiner’s Byron York. “I absolutely reject that notion.”

‘I don’t think that represents where we are as a party and where we’re going as a party,” Jindal continued. ‘That has got to be one of the most fundamental takeaways from this election: If we’re going to continue to be a competitive party and win elections on the national stage and continue to fight for our conservative principles, we need two messages to get out loudly and clearly: One, we are fighting for 100 percent of the votes, and secondly, our policies benefit every American who wants to pursue the American dream. Period. No exceptions.”

The New York Times reported Wednesday afternoon on Romney’s comments, which he made during a conference call with his presidential campaign’s national finance committee.

Skip IntroI'm sure Pills Limbaugh will have some choice words for Traitor Jindal today, but I'll let others suffer through his show to see if I'm right. Just a note to the few rational Republicans left out there. The sooner you ...

Alabama and Mississippi had a higher concentration of election-related tweets with certain racially derogatory terms than other states in the country, a new study says.

The website Floating Sheep, run by geography professors and other academic researchers, analyzed “hate” tweets by geography for the week of the presidential election. The research was prompted by an article on the website Jezebel that collected screenshots of tweets that contained racial slurs following President Obama’s reelection.

“It is a useful reminder that technology reflects the society in which it is based, both the good and the bad,” said Matthew Zook, the author of the analysis and an associate professor at the University of Kentucky’s Department of Geography.

Zook said the researchers searched Twitter for tweets containing certain racially derogatory terms — “monkey” and one other — as well as “Obama,” “reelected” or “won.” They then gave each state a score based on its number of such tweets compared with its overall Twitter activity.

The analysis looked only at geocoded tweets sent Nov. 1 through 7. It found 395 election-related tweets with the specific derogatory terms.

The color-coded map shows which states have higher scores: The darker the green, the higher the concentration of election-related “hate tweets.” States with a relatively low concentration of such tweets, scoring 1 or lower, are marked in yellow.

The states with the highest scores were generally in the Southeast. Louisiana, Tennessee and Georgia had scores higher than 3; Mississippi’s score of 7.4 was second only to Alabama’s 8.1.

Republicans around the country are responding to President Obama’s reelection in a variety of ways — among them: anger, depression, finger-pointing. But nobody had the same reaction as Eric Dondero, a former Ron Paul aide who blogs at libertarianrepublican.net. In a post yesterday, Dondero, reasoning that the only recourse to Obama’s victory is “outright revolt,” laid out the terms of the “personal boycott” against Democrats which he plans to maintain for the rest of his life and that he hopes his followers will as well. What does the boycott entail? Cutting all ties with Democratic family members, friends, and lovers; refusing to work for a Democratic boss; spitting on the ground when a Democrat talks to you; and possibly shitting on your Democratic neighbor’s lawn, among other things:

All family and friends, even close family and friends, who I know to be Democrats are hereby dead to me. I vow never to speak to them again for the rest of my life, or have any communications with them. They are in short, the enemies of liberty. They deserve nothing less than hatred and utter contempt.
I strongly urge all other libertarians to do the same. Are you married to someone who voted for Obama, have a girlfriend who voted ‘O’. Divorce them. Break up with them without haste. Vow not to attend family functions, Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas for example, if there will be any family members in attendance who are Democrats.
Do you work for someone who voted for Obama? Quit your job. Co-workers who voted for Obama. Simply don’t talk to them in the workplace, unless your boss instructs you too for work-related only purposes. Have clients who voted Democrat? Call them up this morning and tell them to take their business elsewhere.
Have a neighbor who votes for Obama? You could take a crap on their lawn. Then again, probably not a good idea since it would be technically illegal to do this. But you could have your dog take care of business. Not your fault if he just happens to choose that particular spot.

A new poll from The Hill finds that 68% of likely voters believe that President Obama has substantially transformed the country since assuming office. While you might think that this is good news for Obama given his promises to change America, the poll finds that only 35% of respondents believe this change has been for the better. In contrast, 56% believe he has changed the country for the worse.

These numbers indicate a continuing, major threat to the president’s reelection hopes. When 56% of the country thinks you’ve changed things for the worse, it’s hard to argue that you deserve another four years.

President Obama’s Chicago-based campaign team has been waiting months to launch a real attack against Mitt Romney’s experience at Bain Capital. Even before Romney’s Republican rivals started going after him, Obama’s team was preparing for the moment that arrived this week.

There is no mystery to the strategy underway here: define Romney before he can fully pivot to the general election electorate after a nomination battle that went on longer than expected and that kept the presumptive nominee pinned to the right of the political spectrum as he fought off more conservative challengers.

Through closing elevator doors, the former president told a reporter Tuesday that the presumptive GOP nominee has his support.

In Chicago and the West Wing, Obama advisers believe attacks on Romney’s record in both private business and state government could disqualify the former governor in the eyes of voters who will decide the outcome in November. Though the initial Obama campaign ad will run in just a few markets in a few states, the Obama-backed super PAC will amplify the message with an advertisement of its own on the same theme. No doubt there is much more coming from both.

In Boston, Romney advisers believe they see a bit of panic in their rival’s moves. They believe the softness of the economy, the slow pace of job creation and the pain still felt by the unemployed and underemployed imperil the Obama’s chances for reelection — a view shared by analysts not attached to Romney’s campaign. They further believe that the political cognoscenti undervalue Romney as a candidate and therefore his chances of winning.

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From Sen. Schumer's Facebook page: There are two simple reasons the comparison does not hold water. First, the federal RFRA was written narrowly to protect individuals' religious freedom from government interference unless the government or state had a compelling interest. ...

UPDATE MARCH 30: NEW TIME FOR LIVE STREAM - 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. PDT NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project will be flying a rocket-powered, saucer-shaped test vehicle into near-space from the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on ...

What's this? Another article on Cracked about how incorrigibly tribal-minded us homo sapiens are? Well, yes. But the proverbial devil is in the proverbial details. Proverbially. It's still worth reading. That's what I'm getting at. Everyone is talking about Scientology ...

China attacks the biggest code repository in the world. After battling a distributed denial of service attack for four days, GitHub on Monday was able to restore normal service levels. The primary target of the assault is greatfire.org, which is ...

An American woman--presumably not Muslim, though she doesn't say one way or the other--married to a Libyan man is taken aback when her 9-year-old daughter suddenly wants to start wearing hijab. This is the story of how conflicted she felt ...

NEW YORK, March 27 (Reuters) - Big Wall Street banks are so upset with U.S. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren's call for them to be broken up that some have discussed withholding campaign donations to Senate Democrats in symbolic protest, ...

By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON, March 30 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a new challenge to President Barack Obama's healthcare law that took aim at a bureaucratic board labeled by some Republicans as a ...

Depending on the outcome of a hearing scheduled for Monday, a 33-year-old Indiana woman could face up to 70 years in prison for what she says was a miscarriage. Reproductive rights advocates say her case is a disturbing example ...

The number of things getting plugged into the "Internet of Things" has already reached the point of satire. But there's a new, extremely low power technology that's being prepared for market that could put computing power and network access ...

Are conservatives anti-science? Spoiler: Conservatives aren't anti-science or pro-science. But, they are pro-common-sense. And once more scientists adopt common sense approach to science, they'll find that they have the support of conservative politicians - the people whose job it is ...

cracked.com Once the fighting started, a lot of people died, well over a million on our side alone. For the war to continue, a constant stream of new fighters had to join up, and they didn't have the benefit of ...

Here is an interesting article on one of Tail Gunner Joe's sick witch hunts that has, unfortunately, been forgotten. I try not to feel schadenfreude of the fate of McCarthy's side kick, Ray Cohn, but I never succeed.

About the Graphic How should a woman try to get ahead in a male-dominated workplace? Perhaps the answer lies less on women "manning up" and more in how businesses value their employees. Many women confront this tension as they ...

If we accept the idea of Orthopraxy over Orthodoxy, then what does evangelism look like? What is the Witness of those who try to follow the Way of Christ Jesus? To evangelize is to spread the good news that we ...

A short column in The Nation that is a must read. The primary difference between liberalism and conservatism, at least in theory, is that the latter is an ideology and the former isn't. Conservatism, as Milton Friedman argued, posits that ...

Blow off Snowden all you like, but what was revealed to be true is still true. The NSA lacks oversight with power. FISA is already too much and now they casually exceed even that generous provision. The world first learned ...

This is a powerful admission of culpability and I applaud his courage in making it. It really should be read in its entirety. Glenn Ford should be completely compensated to every extent possible because of the flaws of a system ...

Sarah Vine of the DM gets it wrong: SARAH VINE: Teaching 11-year-olds about rape is a form of child abuse The problem with this country, I've come to realise, is that it treats adults like children and children like adults. ...